Main menu

Post navigation

I finished my script, and I am ready to start practicing. I freestyle practiced a few times without any script. The first time I said my script it sounded pretty bad. It had so many errors so I changed it. I read it again and I changed it some more. I practiced so much and I hope it pays off!

I changed my script in my head but here was my final script. But, to this day it sounds different every time I say it.

Welcome. I have a couple of things to say before we begin. I just want you to remember these to chemicals: Phenolphthalein and Hydrogen peroxide. Just keep those in your mind. It will be used later on in the presentation. Before we begin my Capstone is about Forensic science, and I will be drawing a TED talk for you today “What is Forensic science?” You may ask. Forensic science is where you take DNA run it through tests and you use that info to catch criminals. I will be explaining this through a story. Not just any story. A boring story. I’m just playing around. I hope. This story is about a crime and I will show you how the forensics come into play. Alright, now let’s begin.

There is a crime scene everyone is there. Flashing cameras, cops holding back the people and the press. In between all of that chaos there’s the detective. He is inspecting the man’s body. He searches his pockets and finds a receipt for a scratch ticket. The time says he bought it at 5pm, the time is currently 11pm so he has been dead for a most 6 hours. They also find his ID and his name is Arnold. But that’s irrelevant. There are some practises to see how long he has been dead. Its where if the body has been dead after 2 hours, the position the body was in will start to change and the body will contract. Which means it will end up straight after 36 hours. He is still contracting so that means he died probably right after he left the store.

There’s not much evidence to gather so they go to the store where Arnold bought the scratch ticket. They check thesecurity camsand see Arnold walking out of the store with his bag. Then a man behind a tree follows him shortly after. So, we will give this situation the benefit of the doubt and assume he is a suspect. So now we know he’s a suspect. In the meantime other investigators find other suspects. The find them with logic and look through every possibility. For example the other store workers or people at the store at that time. The detective asks the store owner for the workers name. They show him the footage. It’s really blurry and most TV shows would just enhance the footage and then find the workers name. But it’s not that simple. You can’t enhance a blurry image. That’s like saying you can make a picture better quality after you take it. But the quality is good enough for the owner to recognize the person. He was a worker indeed and his name is Bruce. They check the store for any evidence and they find a wrench, with a red stain on it. If the detectives are suspicious about the wrench, witch I would definitely be, they take it back to the lab as a possible murder weapon. Evidence should always be well preserved. Weather it’s putting it in a plastic bag or freezing temperatures it always needs to be put where the specific chemical on the object can survive.

There is a special way to check if the red stain is blood. Remember those 2 chemicals? Good it’s ok if you didn’t. Those are special chemicals one might say. Take a cotton swab and take some blood from the wrench. Spray some Phenolphthalein on to it. Then a couple of drops of Hydrogen peroxide. If it is blood, the chemicals inside of the blood would react like an allergy. It would turn pink. In this case, it does. So now Bruce is a big suspect. They take the wrench and run it through a DNA scanner. One specific brand is called the “MiSeq” It’s a pretty new model that shows you a bunch of DNA enhanced a TON. It prints out a pattern combination. Remember this as well. The DNA patterns on the wrench match no suspects so, they go to the store collect some DNA from Bruce run it through the scanner. It has the same as the wrench. So, the murderer is Bruce.

They go to the store owner and ask him where Bruce is. The owner says he will be at work the next day so they wait. On average each forensic science case takes about 56 hours. (2 days and 4 hours) The next day they arrest him and use the wrench as evidence. Next you put all the info on the case in the case file. Case files are an organized way of keeping crimes in a saved place.

Now for everyone’s favorite part, bare with me for one more minute. Fun Facts. Did you know forensic science dates back to 44 BC? Do you still remember those patterns? Only 6 other people in the world have the same DNA patterns as you! Everyone is probably wondering this: what does DNA stand for? It stands for DeoxyriboNucleic Acid. Also you have 4 types of DNA bases: A,S,T, and G and all the bases together make up the big number 6 BILLION.

I couldn’t have done any of this without Ron. Ron is my dads friend that helped me gather some info on DNA tech that we use today. All the people at his office in Cornell University were very open to their studies. Have wonderful day at cap con. Thanks for coming to the lab!

Today I presented my final Capstone presentation in front of the whole class. I did it and there were some minor fixes. Up until that point I was really nervous. I felt like I wasn’t gonna do good because I thought I didn’t have enough information. I felt good at the end. After that, all I wanted to do was do it, again and again, fixing it and doing it.

Mine is very different from the rest of my class. I did mine by drawing and now I’m gonna use the smart board the whiteboard and the Easel. The Easel is a thing with a bunch of giant paper to write on. I’m really excited to present in front of another class instead of our own.

I finally got my interview! It was so much cooler than I thought. His name was Ron he is one of my dad’s friends. I went to Cornell’s labs to see what DNA looks like. We ate lunch together while talking about enhancing DNA over a machine with a microscope inside of it. When I finished my site visit, I sat down with him and I asked my questions. He answered 7/10 questions. My favorite answer was that he “felt free in his workplace”. He got to decide what he did every day. I said thank you to Ron and then my dad and I left. It was fun to interview Ron, and it was better than I expected.

Before I did my interview, I did my site visit. I went to a lab inside of Cornell University. I was so excited. I’ve been waiting for so long and now I can finally finish this. My interview/site visit was due about a couple of weeks ago. I went inside the college and ate lunch with Ron. You should know who he is from my last blog post. He was really open to conversation. When we got to the lab he introduced me to all the people that work in the lab as well.

I got to take a look at ALL the tech inside the lab. It was so cool. I saw specs of DNA bacteria and what viruses do to bacteria. After that is when I interviewed him. Then he offered to come back when I was 16 to see a different more interesting lab. Of course, I said yes. I will definitely go back.

For Capstone, we had to write an essay on our Main Inquiry Question. Since I had my interview yesterday and all the info is fresh in my mind. Even though the guy I interviewed Ron, studied cancer, He still showed a bunch of machines that cut DNA and replace/fix it. He was great. He let me see the lab at Cornell University.

Have you ever heard of Forensic science? Probably not right? Forensic science is where you solve murder cases using fingerprint and DNA (DeoxyriboNucleic Acid) data. After answering our sub-questions, we had to use the answers from our sub-questions to answer this question. My Main Inquiry Question is, How is forensic science used to solve crimes and what part of the process is most important? Honestly, this question looked really hard to answer, but I just tried to do my best to answer. I’m going to break down the question into 2 little parts because I can’t just answer the whole question all at once. Forensic science can back itself up with evidence.

Let’s start with the first part of the question, “How is forensic science used to solve crimes?” Forensic science is used to catch criminals. You can check the murder weapon for a DNA traces, footsteps or marks on the body of course. Then they take all of the DNA traces and put it on a machine which matches a person to their DNA. It shows a bunch of patterns. Then they find the criminals location and arrest him. Forensic science is a very effective way of catching criminals and it paid off in many situations. It also dates back to 44 BC in the case of Julius Caesar when he got stabbed to death. Forensic science is also used to solve crimes in terms of giving evidence. As you can see by my evidence, Forensic science is very important to an average case of murder.

The next part of what process of solving a case is the most important. Usually, an average forensic case takes about 54 hours and 45 minutes, so that’s probably a lot of steps. The most important step would probably be checking the weapon for DNA traces. But actually, research tells you that collecting evidence is the most important part because how would you get DNA traces without the weapon itself. Just so you can agree with me let me tell you all of the steps. First, collect evidence. Second go back to the lab to run tests. Next, you test each piece of evidence for DNA traces. After you finish, you get the patterns of DNA on each piece of evidence and you compare them to suspect’s DNA. Next, you figure out what DNA patterns look similar. Once you find the right one you go find the man/ women’s ID. Then you find out where they live bust in and arrest them. You probably go to court with them and you can use the evidence against them and they get proven guilty. After that, you put all the evidence and research in a case file. A case file is a folder that contains everything about the case to use for future reference. Or when the person you arrested is

a suspect for another crime you can check their criminal records for crimes that person did. It’s all about reputation. Now, let’s put this all together…

Forensic science is a very useful way of catching criminals because they can check DNA machines, to find the criminals identity and then arrest them. Also, the most important the process step is collecting DNA evidence from the crime scene. The question that I’ve been wanting to answer for a few months now and the answer is: Forensic science solves crimes in an easter manner and helps in the end. Also, the most important step is collecting evidence because it is the moral foundation of the case. If you are interested in learning more this is a link to show you how forensic science came to be: http://www.softschools.com/timelines/forensic_science_timeline/99/Here is a youtube video I got a lot of my research from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3-Pj-zbEq8If you want to learn about some equipment used in forensic science click these links:

We recently went to Ellis Island to get a better understanding of immigration. It was fun for the most part, sometimes your just walking around. I enjoyed the movie but that’s not even the good part. I actually fell asleep because I was so tired from waking up at 6:15 A.M. I liked lunch because used 50 cents to look at the statue of Liberty. Then we got to see some immigrant’s names. I found 2 distant relatives with MY last name it was awesome! The ride back was smooth pretty good. I liked the trip. 8/1o witch is pretty good.

Welcome to capstone part 2! Today I will be talking about choosing my main question and 5 sub-questions. I’ll tell you why I have to in a bit. But first, let’s have a little refresher of what happened last time. I choose VR then went to Dc Vs Marvel. What I’m pretty sure that I did not tell you is that I choose Forensic science. Can you make the connection between one DC hero that is a Forensic Scientist? Let’s get back to why I need 6 questions. Part of Capstone is that you need an interview with someone that has to do with the topic you study. Here are the questions I choose:

1: Who do Forensic Scientists work for?

2: What are the different careers in Forensic science?

3: What skills do you need to be a Forensic Scientist?

4: How much of an evidence sample is needed to obtain DNA results?

5: How do I interpret a forensic DNA report?

Alright, that’s all the info I can give for now Ill report asap goodbye for now!

Capstone is a project where you pick a topic and research that topic a lot when you give a presentation. At first, I did not know what to do. After doing the packet to help make your decision it was clear. I was going to do VR. VR (Aka Virtual Reality) I thought was a very interesting topic because it had a lot of engineering and science.

But later on, I changed my topic to DC Comics VS Marvel Comics. I thought it was a better topic for me and I hope I enjoy the process

Finally, only one more to go! I went with the most simple idea possible: Pong game

Here is the final link

When I finished this I had too admit making these really made me better at coding. I might actually do some scratch on my own time. I started out liking Tynker more but now I like scratch more because the instructions give more info on how to do it. Even though Tynker lets you drag the bricks out of the instructions itself, it kind of leaves you hanging. I sort of enjoyed this!